And what would probably be the final installment of my final year project followup. This is an update to project idea. So I emailed Alexandar Bolotov late on Thursday 7th Oct 2010 at probably about 12:25am to confirm to him that I will be following his advice and be doing a game engine for Chess. So basically I requested Alexandar to be my supervisor for the project and to complete that process I had to get his signature on a form which had the last day of submission as 8th Oct 2010. He prompty replied back at about 7:30am (which is way better than some other lecturers) saying that he will not be in office on the 8th but he does agree in being my supervisor. At this point needless to say I did start freaking out because it was the last day for the form submission, my sister was coming back to London and I would finally get to spend some time with her and I had to sort out my final year fees...
Although since I was reading on my phone I scrolled slightly down to read the rest of the message after having freaked out that is. He went on to say that I should put his name down and leave his signature blank and he will sort it out with the campus office and stuff. I truely can not thank him enough for not giving me a hard time about the whole situation.
OK one down and two major things to do... So at about 9:00 am I got out of the house (trying to avoid rush hour :)) and got into London at about 10:10am and headed directly towards the university's international students' office. This was because I did my foundation year at this university which meant that I am entitled to getting a refund of my foundation year fees. This would therefore mean that instead of paying £10,000 for this year I would have to pay less than that (which made me a very happy bunny). On my way I ran into Peter and I do recommend that you guys check out his website by clicking on this link. Peter came with me to the international office and they told me to talk to the finance office. Cutting a long story short I am eligible and I am now a very happy bunny :P.
And finally the part of the day that I was actually looking forward to I headed to Victoria station to pick my sister up :) (btw this is her blog so check it out for a small break :)). She was in the UK for about 10 days for an education conference from work and was just getting back from Brighton. So the plan was that she would spend the rest of the day with me and we would watch movies the whole night and she would be leaving for Kenya the next day in the morning.
So basically spent some time with her and she knocked out while watching the movie... lol... she was pretty tired in her defence. And on Saturday I had to see her off :( so pretty sad about that... But enjoyed the time with her :D.
Saturday 9 October 2010
Thursday 7 October 2010
Final Year Project II
A followup from my last post :)... So I had a very nice 45 min long meeting with a tentative supervisor to discuss my project. The idea that I pitched to him was a Chess game that utilises Artificial Intelligence to play against a player. I had thought of this project as sort of a last resort if all else fails (pretty clever :p). This idea actually got the tutor pretty excited and he suggested a couple of things that I could look into if I do want to go on with this project.
I was initially not too keen in doing the chess project because I think it has been done so many times that it may not impress anyone, but my tutor (it would probably be better to give his name here :)...) Alexander Bolotov (guy not a girl) reassured me that the project is complex enough to impress most people. He also suggested on creating a game engine for chess rather than the complete game and make it modular enough to be reused by other people. To be honest, I have always been intrigued by AI and this project will definately feed my curiousity but I was really hoping to do something for the developers and specific to web development. Hopefully, I will find a way to start both projects in parallel and make the browser open source with limited functionality and publish it on source forge. I will definately keep my fingers crossed and hope this will not be one of my projects I never get down to.
At this point I may have been sorted for my project but funny enough I had scheduled another meeting for the project with Sean Tohill anoth tutor of mine. This idea actually came from him and he said that it has never been done before atleast at this university. The idea was benchmarking networks. Which would mean that I would setup a small network and use skype or some other similar VoIP software to communicate internally. Then I would keep on adding load to the network and seen how good/bad the voice quality would be and so on so forth.
This idea has me a bit excited as it deals with some sort of hacking the network and causing interference and stuff. But this has also added to the difficulty of me having to chose one project.
I am taking the whole of this day to research on what each project will involve and should hopefully make up my mind on which one I should chose. Please help me make my mind by commenting on which project you would do.
I was initially not too keen in doing the chess project because I think it has been done so many times that it may not impress anyone, but my tutor (it would probably be better to give his name here :)...) Alexander Bolotov (guy not a girl) reassured me that the project is complex enough to impress most people. He also suggested on creating a game engine for chess rather than the complete game and make it modular enough to be reused by other people. To be honest, I have always been intrigued by AI and this project will definately feed my curiousity but I was really hoping to do something for the developers and specific to web development. Hopefully, I will find a way to start both projects in parallel and make the browser open source with limited functionality and publish it on source forge. I will definately keep my fingers crossed and hope this will not be one of my projects I never get down to.
At this point I may have been sorted for my project but funny enough I had scheduled another meeting for the project with Sean Tohill anoth tutor of mine. This idea actually came from him and he said that it has never been done before atleast at this university. The idea was benchmarking networks. Which would mean that I would setup a small network and use skype or some other similar VoIP software to communicate internally. Then I would keep on adding load to the network and seen how good/bad the voice quality would be and so on so forth.
This idea has me a bit excited as it deals with some sort of hacking the network and causing interference and stuff. But this has also added to the difficulty of me having to chose one project.
I am taking the whole of this day to research on what each project will involve and should hopefully make up my mind on which one I should chose. Please help me make my mind by commenting on which project you would do.
Wednesday 6 October 2010
Final Year Project
So, its the middle of the night, I have a cold and I absolutely cannot sleep. What do I do you ask? I take out my Android phone, fire up Blogger Droid and start typing this post :).
As always a post after a long time discussing future plans of my life. As those of you who know me I am in my final year of my undergraduate degree in Software Engineering and desperately looking for a project idea that could possibly blow peoples mind and also be simple enough for me to finish over the course of this year.
I have been thinking of doing a developer tool for programmers of any platform and possibly any language could use. This got me thinking of what I have been doing over summer, which has been loads of web development and design with creating cross-browser friendly CSS, which contrary to my belief is not easy. You have to first make a base stylesheet which is compatible with your favourite browser (in my case FireFox) and code for it, then you open your second browser and check the website there and so on so forth. At the end of the day you hope to come up with code that makes the website look more or less the same throughout all the browsers and screen sizes you could get your hands on (i actually recommend using different operating systems as well cause for some reason FireFox for ubuntu doesn't render the page the same way as FireFox for Windows, who knew). So anyway after hours and hours and possibly days of tweaking a testing your finally done with the website and are happy with the way it looks and feels everywhere. After this you give your client the good news and he/she decides to check in an obsolete browser like internet explorer 6 or something and calls you back with hopefully a screens of how the page is rendering.
Know I do know that IE6 should not be supported and a lot of my friends feel very strongly about that but sometimes you just don't have a choice.
So anyway before I go on another tangent, I just got an idea of making a web browser with interchangeable rendering engines, screen simulations, OS simulations and etc. This is however just an idea and I hope to have a word with one of my lecturers tomorrow. In the meantime please leave a comment on this post with any ideas, or just anything you would like to say of my half baked project proposal. I do hope to read your comments soon.
Good night.
As always a post after a long time discussing future plans of my life. As those of you who know me I am in my final year of my undergraduate degree in Software Engineering and desperately looking for a project idea that could possibly blow peoples mind and also be simple enough for me to finish over the course of this year.
I have been thinking of doing a developer tool for programmers of any platform and possibly any language could use. This got me thinking of what I have been doing over summer, which has been loads of web development and design with creating cross-browser friendly CSS, which contrary to my belief is not easy. You have to first make a base stylesheet which is compatible with your favourite browser (in my case FireFox) and code for it, then you open your second browser and check the website there and so on so forth. At the end of the day you hope to come up with code that makes the website look more or less the same throughout all the browsers and screen sizes you could get your hands on (i actually recommend using different operating systems as well cause for some reason FireFox for ubuntu doesn't render the page the same way as FireFox for Windows, who knew). So anyway after hours and hours and possibly days of tweaking a testing your finally done with the website and are happy with the way it looks and feels everywhere. After this you give your client the good news and he/she decides to check in an obsolete browser like internet explorer 6 or something and calls you back with hopefully a screens of how the page is rendering.
Know I do know that IE6 should not be supported and a lot of my friends feel very strongly about that but sometimes you just don't have a choice.
So anyway before I go on another tangent, I just got an idea of making a web browser with interchangeable rendering engines, screen simulations, OS simulations and etc. This is however just an idea and I hope to have a word with one of my lecturers tomorrow. In the meantime please leave a comment on this post with any ideas, or just anything you would like to say of my half baked project proposal. I do hope to read your comments soon.
Good night.
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